In bed at 11:00, but up around 4:30, Shirou snuck out of his dorm room, careful not to wake the other four children in there on his way out.

Even with all the lights off, Shirou could navigate just fine, and quickly left the dorm room, moving down into the common room.

It would be another hour and a half before the ban on walking through the halls would be lifted, so Shirou couldn't exactly leave, so he would have to do his morning exercise routine there.

Stretches, pushups, situps, lunges and squats. He turned his magic circuits on and off, flooding his muscles with the magic power in order to burst weak points and shape the tears for when they would heal to make more efficient muscle. He performed his deep breathing and meditation exercises. All the while building up a healthy sweat on his young body.

He worked out from a solid hour before the first presence started to make itself known to him, while he was in the middle of his second set of one armed pushups.

"Looks like we've got an early riser among our little firsties." A young woman who had come down from the girl's dorm said in a teasing manner.

Shirou glanced up at the girl, the same seventh year whose hair had spontaneously changed the previous night. Or he assumed it was her. Her hair color now was a pale silver and rather curly, and her eyes had gone from gold to purple. Even her facial structure was different. But unless there were other people who could change their appearances so easily in Hufflepuff, it was probably her.

"With how tired everyone was last night, I didn't get to give you a proper welcome. So, welcome to Hufflepuff, Mr. Cook." The girl said, giving him a wink. "Names Tonks. Just Tonks. And don't let anyone tell you otherwise."

"Shirou Emiya. A pleasure to meet you, Just Tonks." Shirou joked while still doing his pushups, earning a snort of approval. "Did we meet before at the Leaky Cauldron? I'm afraid I can't recognize you."

"We did, but I suppose I can't blame you for not recognizing me. I was doing some field training for my summer classes. Couldn't let myself be recognized, could I?" Tonks said, before her entire body started to change in front of Shirou.

She shrank three inches and her hair became straighter and blond. Her face changed, becoming more mature, until she looked like she was in her forties, instead of her late teens. And finally, Shirou… still didn't recognize her.

"Sorry, I'm pretty bad with faces." Shirou said guiltily, stopping his workout so that he could get a better look. Tonks laughed at him for it.

"It's fine. Not like we talked anyways. But man, I have got to say, your food was some of the best I had ever tasted. Blows even the stuff we get at Hogwarts out of the water." Tonks said as she slowly changed back. "Speaking of which, I don't suppose there is the possibility of getting some while we are here? I'll help you with tutoring in exchange for a lunch I can take with me off campus."

"Sounds like a fair trade, though I don't know where the kitchens are." Shirou said, hoping that she would provide that information, before something clicked. "Do you go off campus often?"

"I'm in a Ministry program for training future Aurors. We spend a lot of time at the Ministry for introduction to the type of work an Auror would do." Tonks admitted. "And the meals they have there are overpriced and kind of suck. Plus, my boss is a paranoid nutter and won't let me eat anything I haven't seen prepared right in front of me, with ingredients I provided, to be sure it wasn't poisoned. So a lovingly made packed lunch would be heavenly." Her throat changed shape a bit and she let out a roar in a man's voice. "CONSTANT VIGILANCE! He thinks that people are conspiring to force him into retirement as part of a sinister plot by Dark Wizards. Really, they just want him to go away because he's paranoia causes them so much of a headache."

"I'm sure he is just worried for you." Shirou said with a smile, getting a scoff from the girl as her only reply. "So, where is that kitchen?"

Professor Sprout was greeted to the sounds of House Elves crying and beating their heads on every conceivable object as she entered the Hogwarts' kitchens, called by a jackrabbit patronus from Tonks, saying it was an emergency situation.

"What in the devil is going on here!?" She shouted as she looked around the room and the chaos only to find Tonks and the first year boy, Shirou Emiya, wrestling the school's head chef, a very old House Elf, to the ground as he struggled to get out of their grips, tears flowing down his cheeks. "Ms. Tonks, Mr. Emiya, what is the meaning of this!?"

"Professor, you have to help us!" Tonks cried. "He's trying to kill himself!"

"What!?" The Professor shouted in disbelief, noticing the knife nearby that the elf was trying to reach out for.

"I don't deserve to be the Head Chef! I should just die!" The House Elf cried. The elf snapped his fingers and the knife was back in his hand.

"You're all over reacting! It was just some miso soup and a few sandwiches!" Shirou shouted at the crying elf as he grabbed the wrist holding the knife and pinned it to the ground.

Sprout looked at the scene in horror before finally taking action and restraining the elves who were hurting themselves. "I forbid any of you from hurting or killing yourselves! Now calm down!" She shouted at them, letting the magic of their nature force them to do as she said. She then grabbed Shirou and Tonks and dragged them out of there. "You two are going to explain to me just what has happened here."

She just knew that breakfast was going to be delayed that morning.

"And that is why I am now banned from the Hogwarts kitchens." Shirou said flatly as he sat in the front row of the History of Magic class, along with Iris, Hermione and Susan, awaiting the Professor.

Perhaps challenging a magical race of willful servants to a cooking contest for the ownership of their kitchen hadn't been the smartest of ideas, but they had been trying to usurp his god given right to cook for his friends. That could not be allowed.

He regretted nothing.

"He tried to kill himself over losing a cooking contest?" Hermione said in disbelief.

"Apparently, his family had been the head chefs at Hogwarts for five generations, and he had brought dishonor upon their memory." Shirou explained.

"I've heard about House Elves compulsively hurting themselves when they thought they failed to fulfill their duties as servants, but that is…" Susan was looking at Shirou in disbelief. "Your cooking couldn't possibly be that good."

"Oh trust me. It is that good." Iris said with a sigh. "Guess you wouldn't be able to cook for a while though."

"Not really. One of the House Elves told me about a hidden place at Hogwarts called the 'Room of Requirement' that can basically generate a room full of anything you need to fulfill a request of it, so long as those objects can be conjured. So I have access to a fully functioning kitchen. I just need the ingredients." Shirou reported.

"Ingredients can't be conjured?" Iris asked, looking very interested, either in such a magical room or in Shirou's cooking.

"You can conjure just about anything, but they wouldn't be edible. It would look like bread, smell like bread, taste like bread, but once you ate it, it would turn back into magic energy, at which point it would poison you and you would probably die." Shirou informed her.

"Oh… So what's for lunch?"

Classes at Hogwarts were interesting, and much easier to follow than those at the Clocktower. No wonder, since they were aimed towards children, rather than those with at least fifteen years worth of learning in seclusion, and a magic crest with decades of accumulated knowledge in it.

It really was like the difference between K-12 and Graduate School.

That wasn't to say that Shirou was having a walk in the park. His magical theory was only slightly better than the average child who had grown up in the Wizarding World. So he would need to study as hard as any Muggleborn in that.

And while he would be fine in Transfiguration, since alteration and projection had been his focuses, he had not been able to cast a single charm spell properly during his own studies, despite the ridiculous existence known as a wand providing assistance.

The style of magic used in this world had a lot in common with the style of using sacraments used by the Church, in that there was a common set of words and action that would produce the same result regardless of the caster, rather than the more customized spells used by magi who developed their own mysteries. And like many sacraments, most of the spells dated back to the Roman Empire, though this world's magic style was older than Roman Catholicism by a few hundred years. Many of the spells were actually the same.

They might even be the same thing or one evolving from the other, for all Shirou knew.

But rather than using their own magic circuits to power their spells, the magic people of this world used a blend of their raw Od with the magic energy generated within their wand's magical core, a core made from a body part of a Phantasmal Creature. Creatures like dragons, phoenixes and unicorns. Creatures that in Shirou's world would have been beasts capable of leveling kingdoms, but in this world were weakened by the weaker connection to the Root, even if there was enough mana to support them.

While they still existed, they weren't as powerful. So dragons and phoenixes could be beaten with only a small army, rather than requiring heroes empowered by the Greater Will of Humanity to even stand a chance.

All the spells that could be cast with a wand could be done without one as well, but then the wizard had to do all the heavy lifting themselves. Shirou felt as though the use of a wand as a crutch, since they didn't need to learn to control their magic circuits.

It was certainly easier and safer. With magic circuits, a single stray thought could get you killed, where the will of the wand helped guard against that kind of disaster.

According to his Magical Theory textbook, wandless magic and magic circuits were still the primary method of spellcasting in Africa, and still practiced by more experienced wizards and witches, but wands were so convenient that they had spread through most of the world.

Shirou wondered if the wands would still work if he brought them back to his old world.

He couldn't see any reason why they wouldn't, but then again, he wasn't well versed in magical theory.

Not that he was very far into the semester. It was just the end of the first week, and he had participated in all of his classes only once. All save for one.

Potions.

"I hate him. I hate Snape." Iris growled between bites of her perfectly seasoned, stir fried chicken, tears of hot anger in her eyes.

"Was it that bad?" Shirou asked, starting to worry about what would be coming for them after the lunch break, as the last class he had for the week was a three hour class with Ravenclaw.

"That slimy git! It's like he had a personal vendetta against me!" Iris shouted, unafraid of being overheard, as they were eating their lunch within the Room of Requirement, and it was just the two of them this time, with Tonks out at the Ministry.

She then gave a horrifying tale of being asked to recite several things from the book without warning, and of the Professor threatening to force Neville to feed his potion to his own toad. Iris had lost five house points in total over the course of the class for not advising Neville while he was making his potion, while Neville was three seats away from her.

"Why was he targeting me anyway!? What did I ever do to him!?"

"Hm." Shirou said, not actually caring about the house point stuff, though wondering if the Professor had really been bullying his students. And threatening to poison a students pet? Could a Professor really get away with that?

Well, he supposed that he would find out.

Shirou had left early to find his way down into the dungeon and to the Potions classroom, though despite being early, a few Ravenclaws were already sitting at some of the stations towards the front of the class. Each row had four stations, divided into pairs, and the first two rows were already completely filled by Ravenclaw students.

Not surprising. The same thing happened in their Theory of Magic class, and in Ancient Runes, the two other classes which Hufflepuff shared with Ravenclaw. The Ravenclaw students would show up early and take all the seats in the front, forcing the Hufflepuff students to the back.

Yet another reason why the Hufflepuff students didn't particularly like Ravenclaw. Not that Shirou cared either way.

But while there were plenty of brown nosers who had set themselves up in the front row, there was one student who was sitting in the very back. Someone who hadn't yet been a part of any of their previous classes.

The young Rin sat by herself, book open and reading at the back of the class.

Despite having had two other classes with Ravenclaw, Shirou had yet to see this iteration of Rin in a class. So after a moment's pause, he headed over to where she was sitting.

"Mind if I sit here?" Shirou asked in Japanese.

Rin glanced up at him, seeming slightly surprised to have someone speak to her in her native tongue, but quickly responded with a shrug. "Go ahead. The seat is open."

Shirou took the seat and started to get out his things. "I'm Emiya Shirou. It's nice to meet you."

"Tohsaka Rin. I'll be in your care, Emiya-kun." Rin replied, trying to seem uninterested as she continued to stare at her book. "I don't recognize you from Mahoutokoro, so you must be a local, but you don't have an accent. Your Japanese sounds perfect."

"I didn't go to any magic school in Japan. I can't say for sure that I was born in Japan, but I did live there for several years. I just accidently found myself in Britain and was invited to Hogwarts." Shirou explained.

"Sounds complicated." Rin said, and didn't press into it. She was never a fan of getting mixed up in someone else's complicated matters. "Well, at least there is someone else here who speaks Japanese. I suppose I can allow you to keep my company."

"I'm honored." Shirou snorted. Even if it wasn't his Rin, Rin was Rin. "I didn't see you in any of our other classes. Was anything wrong?"

"No. I am simply not taking them." Rin said with a shrug. "I took four years of Theory of Magic and Ancient Runes while I was still at Mahoutokoro, since school there starts at the age of seven. No point in taking them again, so I am using that time for independent study. I still have to take the midterm assessment exams with everyone else, but I could take the O.W.L.s right now and get an E on them. I'm mostly only taking wand related classes for first years."

"Is that so?" Shirou said, noting the girl's confidence in her abilities, even though he didn't have the slightest clue what a O.W.L. was or if an 'E' was a good grade or not. "Pity we don't have more of those kinds of classes together than."

Shirou and Rin talked pretty casually while waiting for class to start, talking about the parts of Japan they had lived and their impressions of Hogwarts thus far.

After a while, the other Hufflepuff students arrived to take their seats, including Susan Bones, who gave Shirou a look of disappointment before going to sit with another Hufflepuff girl, whose name escaped him.

And then finally, the door to the professor's office opened, and the Head of Slytheron himself entered the room.

Professor Snape was probably the Professor that Shirou knew the least about, as the others had visited the Leaky Cauldron at least once in order to escort Muggleborn students into Diagon Alley, but it seemed that Professor Snape didn't take part in that chore.

He was a tall man with a thin face, sharp nose and straight black hair that came down to his shoulders. His expression was bitter and he looked about the Ravenclaws in the front row with something close to disgust, making the children uncomfortable.

"Same as every year. A bunch of fools who believed that they could learn an art by merely reading it in a book, climbing over each other to show off knowledge that they didn't earn. How… disappointing." Snape said, causing the Ravenclaw children to wilt a little. Unused to being insulted for their eagerness. "Though I suppose it is better than those who weren't even motivated enough to open their books. I look forward to seeing just how many of you will injure yourselves this year with your carelessness." His gaze turned towards Hufflepuffs, before finding Shirou and Rin in the back. "Oh. It hasn't even been a week yet, and we already have our first House Traitors. Well, we'll see how well you do."

The Professor then went into a rant about how potion making was an art and how powerful it was, then assigned them their first task, a potion that cured boils.

The students got their potion ingredients and got to work.

"Emiya-kun, you're supposed to use 6 snake fangs. Not 4." Rin hissed as she finished grinding up her own fangs with the mortar before adding them to the potion and waving her wand over it.

"Don't worry. I know what I'm doing." Shirou replied as he took the remaining two snake fangs and dropped them in an extract of milkweed, letting them soak as the rest of the ground up fangs boiled in the cauldron before grinding up the others and adding them as well.

"Don't blame me when it explodes in your face." Rin said sharply, though she had an eye on Shirou's grinning face.

He knew exactly what he was doing.

"Mr. Emiya, why did you decide to soak your snake fangs in milkweed?" Professor Snape asked Shirou as everyone handed in their potions for the day.

"It was to act as a temporary buffer, so that more of the essence from the snake fangs survives to react to the porcupine quills." Shirou replied calmly as the Potion's master hovered over him.

"And the reason why you dropped the temperature of the fire, and added the horned slug juices before removing the cauldron from the flames?"

"Too much heat causes the horned slug juices to react too quickly, but if you can control the temperature, you can make the mixture form its precipitant before the potion has a chance to thicken. It makes the later stages of the potion easier."

"Your layering of a ginger root strip in flobberworm mucus instead of using powdered ginger root?"

"You want to prioritize the reaction between the mucus and root, and that is the best way to do it. If you didn't, you'd end up losing most of the powdered root to the rest of the potion ingredients before it bonds with the mucus. Though you do have to fish the strip out afterwards before applying magic energy."

Snape stopped asking his questions and just stared at Shirou, before his eyes went down to the sky blue potion, which was releasing a very subtle pink smoke. "...Perfect." Snape said, before his eyes turned to the rest of the class. "May this be a lesson to all of you. Most of the instructions within the books are not necessarily the best way of brewing a potion. In fact, they are usually the dumbed down versions, meant to allow even hopeless fools like you to at least have some measure of success in brewing the potion. True potion masters understand the nature of potions, and can go against the established recipe. That is why potion making is an art. What Mr. Emiya has done is not something any of you could have learned from a mere book. Artistry takes talent."

Snape glared at all of them before returning his attention to Shirou.

"Well done. Many of the changes you made to your potion are changes I would have made myself." Snape said, looking Shirou right in the eyes. "It is clear to me now that you are only in your current house because the Hat failed to sort you properly. A pity your talents are going to waste. Sadly, I can't aware points to the house you were supposed to be in, so, in light of the best Cure of Boils ever brewed by a student at Hogwarts… 25 points to Hufflepuff."

"Thank you, Professor." Shirou said.

He didn't really care about the points, but it seemed like a lot of them to give.

From Shirou's understanding, the houses usually gathered about 400 points over the course of the year, and around 200 of that was because of Quidditch. So to get 25 points at once in the first week seemed like a lot.

Though that might have been calculated. Snape awarding points while saying that Shirou didn't belong in Hufflepuff in order to make sure that the words stuck around. Perhaps the man was trying to stir up trouble for Shirou in the future by calling him a House Traitor, and saying that he shouldn't have been in Hufflepuff to begin with.

Was the man actually evil, or just someone who couldn't open his mouth without being an asshole? Shirou had no idea. Though he could definitely see the guy threatening to poison a child's pet.

The class was dismissed, so Shirou cleaned up his station and was going to make his way towards the door when someone grabbed onto his robes in order to stop him.

Shirou looked back to see Rin holding tight to his sleeve, her eyes burning with curiosity. A look that Shirou recognized as meaning she would never allow him to escape until she got what she wanted.

"Tell me how you know how to brew potions."

It was not a request.

"Cooking? Are you trying to tell me that you know how to brew potions like that because you have experience with cooking?" Rin said in disbelief after having cornered Shirou after class, dragging him into an empty room in order to talk.

"A lot of the same principles for how and why you do things are the same in potions and in cooking." Shirou explained. Of course, he also had been able to extract nearly a hundred years worth of potions experience through the various tools in the classroom, but no need to tell her that. "Haven't you ever cooked before?"

"Not really. No." Rin admitted.

"Really?" Shirou said, truly surprised. His Rin had been just as good of a cook as he had been, at least when it came to Chinese food. So to hear that this Rin had no experience with cooking was surprising.

Rin had first learned to cook for pretty much the same reason that Shirou had. Because she had been orphaned and it was between looking to cook properly or living off microwave dinners. Though since Shirou worked at a restaurant, his number of recipes had been a lot larger, and he had received a lot more practice.

…Was this Rin not an orphan?

Without a Grail War, did her father not die? Did her mother not commit suicide? Did she still have a proper family waiting for her back in Japan?

Such questions were probably taboo to ask, but Shirou couldn't help but wonder the answer.

A Rin that existed despite the differences in the timelines, because the 'History' determined her to be an important person. Just like how most timelines had a King Arthur. But that same history should have demanded that Rin's family be dead, shouldn't it? Or were their deaths not a key part of Rin's fate? Perhaps the world being further away from the Root had allowed this Rin's fate to be different. Or maybe it was just 'Luck', the inherent power to influence ones own fate.

Zelretch was probably the only one who knew the answers to such things.

Shirou didn't even know if the girl was an orphan or not.

"Would you like to learn how? I could teach you a thing or two about cooking." Shirou offered.

"Shouldn't you be offering to help me with potions work, not cooking?" Rin said, crossing her arms and raising an eyebrow.

"You have your priorities, I have mine. Besides, cooking is better for the spirit." Shirou replied with a shrug and a grin. "It's not like you needed help with potions anyways. What you lacked in experience and insight, you made up for with first class power."

Potions was a form of magic, and while the steps were important, your ability to use magic in order to force your view of the world was perhaps more important. So Rin, who was a natural talent seen only once in a generation, had produced results above and beyond the other students even though they had all used the exact same steps.

"I'm not going to settle for just being first class. I will be the best." Rin huffed, flipping back one of her side ponytails as she did so. "Fine. I'll take your cooking lessons if you also talk me through the potion recipes as well."

"Alright then. Follow me and I'll show you the kitchen we will be using."